Ant Instructions

Ant is similar to Make but is portable to any platform that supports Java. See the Jakarta Ant Project for Ant downloads and documentation.

Example

Ant builds are governed by a build.xml file that serves much the same purpose as make's Makefile.The following build.xml fragment shows how java+ fits into the Ant build process. Change the taskdef classpath to where you installed java+ and adjust the other option settings to match your build environment. See Ant's documentation for full instructions.

<target name="build/java+.jar" depends="init">

  <taskdef name="javaplus"
    classpath="java+.jar">
    classname="edu.virtualschool.javaplus.Ant"
  </taskdef>

  <javaplus 
    verbose="false"
    force="true"
    bundle="bndl"
    srcDir="src"
    binDir="build/bin"
    dstDir="build/dst"
    srcSuffix=".java"
    dstSuffix=".java"
    binSuffix=".properties"
    skipDir="CVS"
    skipSuffix=".bak"
  />

  <javac
    srcDir="build/dst"
    binDir="build/bin"
    classpath="${classpath}"
  />

  <jar 
      jarfile="build/java+.jar"
      manifest="manifests/GraphicalAdapter.txt">
    <fileset dir="build/bin">
      <exclude name="java+.jar" />
    </fileset>
  </jar>

</target>

This fragment preprocesses all source files, compiles the result, and builds a jar file each time ant is run. The taskdef statement registers AntAdapter class as an Ant task. The java+ statement launches Java+ with the options explained in the first section to generate files into dstDir and binDir as appropriate, The javac statement compiles the dstDir contents and adds them to binDir. The jar statement builds the combined binDir contents into a jar file.

Ant Options Reference

You convey your compilation process to java+ by specifying the following parameters in Ant's build.xml file. All are optional if the defaults (shown in parentheses) are acceptable:

verbose="true" (false)

Selects verbose output. The default is to only log errors.

force="true" (false)

Forces reprocessing of inputs even when outputs are up to date. By default, up to date inputs are skipped (including non-java files).

project="projectDirectory" (.)

Specifies the path to the project directory, by default, ".".

bundle="bundleVariableName" (bndl)

Enables the bundle option and specifies the bundle variable name. This option redirects all Java+ strings into ResourceBundle files, replacing them with bundleVariableName.getString() calls. The default is to convert Java+ strings to ordinary Java strings.

digraphs="fourCharacters" ({{}})

Specifies the digraph characters that will delimit Java+ strings. The first and last pairs must be different.

srcDir="sourceDirectory" (src)
dstDir="destinationDirectory" (dst)
binDir="binaryDirectory" (bin)

Specifies the source (srcDir), destination (dstDir), and binary (binDir) directories, all relative to the project directory. The binary output directory (binDir) is used for resource bundle files generated by the bundle option, and as the destination for non-java input files (except those skipped by the skipDir/skipSuffix options below). Output directories are created automatically as required.

srcSuffix="sourceSuffix" (.java)
dstSuffix="destionationSuffix" (.java)
binSuffix="binarySuffix" (.properties)

Specifies the suffix for java+ source files (srcSuffix), the suffix to be generated for java+ output files (i.e. javac/jikes input files), and for java+ output files generated by the bundle option (resource bundle files; i.e. binSuffix). "Binary" signifies the directory into which the compiler will emit binary output files; it doesn't mean that other files can't be stored there to be eventually conveyed to the jar file, such as ascii resource files. If suffixes don't begin with a period ('.'), one will be automatically prepended.

skipDir="directoryName"
skipSuffix="skipSuffix"

srcDir subdirectories named directoryName, and srcDir file names ending in skipSuffix, will be silently skipped. Both are cumulative and can be specified as many times as required. By default only srcDir file or directory names beginning with "." are skipped.